Wednesday, February 27, 2013

I recently viewed the 2010 film Skyline for the first time and then watched it again a few days later to pick up what meager details I missed the first time around. Long story short: I love the concept of this movie and am even a bit haunted and creeped out by it and was greatly impressed by it's special effects which were some of the best I have ever seen for a science fiction movie as unexpected as that seems from this level of movie. However, the downside is that I hate the acting, directing, and writing of this movie which seems to be a victim of it's budget being directed towards what it did well at the expense of what it did not do well. This is reminiscent of original 1978-79 Battlestar Galactica television series. When watching Skyline one cannot shake the sense that it was influenced by the 2008 film Cloverfield what with the first person feel as we follow the soulless experiences and insufferable character development of the vapid and immature young adult main characters all of whose deaths one is rooting for starting fairly early in the movie... and the movie does not disappoint in that regard... just like in Cloverfield. Likewise, one can see the influence of the 1996 film Independence Day which featured an overwhelming alien invasion of Earth as well as that of the 2005 film War of the Worlds which featured another overwhelming invasion of Earth by aliens but more similarly to Skyline features the aliens gruesomely processing human beings much the same as humans process animal livestock for food. With all that being said now I conclude this review on a positive note by pointing out once again how wonderfully creepy the concept of this movie is executed by way of wonderful special effects featuring most prominently the menacingly mesmerizing blue light which captivates and captures human prey whom then are then anti-gravitationally vacuumed up en mass into the bowels of the huge hover ships looming over Los Angeles. Near the end of the movie we see New York being thus afflicted with the implication that the entire world is suffering the same fate. Real life is full of unhappy endings and I have no problem with a movie ending sans a classic Hollywood happy-clappy conclusion. It is worth noting that this movie also once again features the recurring theme of the end of our civilization, a topic I have discussed here before which you can follow by way of the "end of the age" tag below.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

This past weekend at the Great San Francisco Crystal Fair I discovered the specimen below on sale from one of the higher-end dealers in the show. I am quite familiar with the wonderful amethyst from Artigas, Uruguay, but this specimen was like none I had ever seen from there... or anywhere! It contained not only calcite on amethyst, something that is not unheard of from the material out of Minas Gerais, Brazil, but also hematite atop individual dogtooth calcite crystals in the midst of calcite crystal clusters atop the amethyst. From the looks of the amethyst which seems to contain some cacoxenite inclusions I'd say it is actually material from Minas Gerais, Brazil, but that is not what the mineral specimen label said. Therefore, I'm not sure one way or the other.

Monday, February 25, 2013

I found a brief window of opportunity to get away from the Rocks & Relics booth in which I worked at the 59th Annual Tucson Gem & Mineral Show at the Tucson Convention Center week-before-last. During that time I was able to capture the following images of the display cases featured at this year's show whose theme was the mineral fluorite. I did so with my clunky little old camera so please pardon the imperfection of some of the images. There are caption comments for some of the images but not most of them.